Windows 10: Good method to back up Win 10 system?

How big is your system . I am trying reflect now and its pretty good in my opinion. Almost certain I will pay for it after my 30 trial.
just did another test this morning But My system (190gb) took 40mins to back up and 30 mins to restore .
I was reasonably pleased with that too.

Mike

 

I have all my data on a separate SSD but mostly goes straight to NAS in RAID 1. The 3min backup is just the OS and programs on SSD drive.

 

Was that with the standard (Recommended) compression? You might also try file caching, you select it in Advanced Settings, the target drive should allow write caching as well. It should speed up the back-up process.

I don't think you can go wrong with Macrium, I have used the paid version for a couple of years.

 

There is nothing wrong with the Windows back up image it does what it says on the tin and I've tried it and my image restored as expected, however it comes up as a windows 7 image from a windows 10 CD rescue disk.
Regards

 

If you want a totally flawless backup, you could use my method.

Advantages:
-Absolute perfect byte-for-byte backup.
-Can be restored to an exact point
(for example if you backed up, upgraded operating system and found it did not work, you can go back to the exact point you were at when you backed up)
-Compressed with very fast decompression or very good compression ratio
-Completely free

Disadvantages:
-Cannot be backup up while using Windows
-Is not a differencing backup
-Generally must have an equal or larger sized storage disk to contain the backup
-You must be more technically literate, as there is no GUI. (though you can use one if you want)


This works particularly well if Windows is installed on an SSD, and you have a large HDD for data.

Download a Linux distribution. I use ArchLinux.

Boot the operating system in Live mode.

Locate your system partition with Code: fdisk -l[/quote] or Code: blkid[/quote] Mount the location where you wanna save the backup. Code: mount /dev/sdXn /mnt[/quote]
Then using the Unix command Code: dd if=/dev/sdXn bs=10M | lz4 -v > /mnt/path/to/backup.img.lz4[/quote] The backup begins, and will be a perfect image compressed with a fast modern compression algorithm.


To restore the image you use
Code: lz4 -d /mnt/path/to/backup.img.lz4 | dd of=/dev/sdXn bs=10M[/quote] When finished, unmounts your backup store location, and/or simply reboot.




Online backups (online meaning when using the operating system to be backed up, not meaning the internet) are great and all but all of the Windows tools I've seen are limited in that they don't back up 100% of everything, and cannot help you much when your filesystem gets corrupted. You still gotta reinstall and set everything back up.

Other software that makes full image backups always seems to have some lame catch (proprietary image format, must buy pro version to restore more than 10GB, cannot backup X because of Y limitation). Perfect image backup with 'dd' is the most thorough backup you can get. And you can even mount the backed up image from within windows using ImDisk.

With ImDisk you can actually get a lot of the same results, but that's out of the scope of this post.

 

Everyone I've talked to lately has suggested this, I'll have to look it up - Thanks for reminding me!

 

How does that run, does it do what you need?

 

I found a limitation on Macrium reflect that I am not keen about. You can't schedule multiple backups per day.
I know it can be done via scripting but I can't see why they haven't made this easier.

I am trying Ameoi Professional at the moment as well as Macrium. It DOES do multiple backups per day and seems just a reliable at restoring too.
As its less money than macrium and for that you get two licences and it's free upgrades forever I think I will buy that instead!

I will keep doing backups and restoring them for a week or two but if I don't get any problems I'll buy it.

Mike

 

However you back up, don't leave your backup drive attached or mapped when you are not using it. Ransomware like Cryptolocker will encrypt any drive that it finds so you'll still be SOL if your backups get encrypted too.

 

An advantage to Macrium Reflect over the Windows built-in image is that you can mount the Macrium Reflect image and retrieve individual files from it. Can you do that with the image that WIndows makes? (I don't know, have never tried it.)

 

MR is the best of it's kind , IMHO.

 

or Code: blkid[/quote] Mount the location where you wanna save the backup. Code: mount /dev/sdXn /mnt[/quote]
Then using the Unix command Code: dd if=/dev/sdXn bs=10M | lz4 -v > /mnt/path/to/backup.img.lz4[/quote] The backup begins, and will be a perfect image compressed with a fast modern compression algorithm.


To restore the image you use
Code: lz4 -d /mnt/path/to/backup.img.lz4 | dd of=/dev/sdXn bs=10M[/quote] When finished, unmounts your backup store location, and/or simply reboot.




Online backups (online meaning when using the operating system to be backed up, not meaning the internet) are great and all but all of the Windows tools I've seen are limited in that they don't back up 100% of everything, and cannot help you much when your filesystem gets corrupted. You still gotta reinstall and set everything back up.

Other software that makes full image backups always seems to have some lame catch (proprietary image format, must buy pro version to restore more than 10GB, cannot backup X because of Y limitation). Perfect image backup with 'dd' is the most thorough backup you can get. And you can even mount the backed up image from within windows using ImDisk.

With ImDisk you can actually get a lot of the same results, but that's out of the scope of this post.[/quote] That's way too complicated. AOMEI Backupper does a great job and has options for how much you want to compress the data. You can even choose no compression but the default option seems to be the best. It also has boot disk creation. Either in a Linux format or WinPE. Restoring using the boot disk works flawlessly but you can also restore from within Windows. If the backup to be restored is of the drive currently in use, the program loads the backupper into memory and then restores the image on to the current drive. It's a great, and free, program.

I do my images on to a second HDD installed in the machine. That works faster than using a USB external drive.

 

Many years ago, I used Acronis TI; however, they came out with a couple of versions (5 plus years ago) that got a lot of criticism. Since that time, I have stuck with the Win7 built in features for backups and system images. I have not encountered any problems doing that, although now that I am using Win10, I have no idea how dependable the built in system images and backups are. I assume they are okay, although rather basic like WIn7.

But reading this thread, I am impressed with the number of people who have given high marks to Macrium Reflect. So much so that I decided to install the free version this evening. And I think I can have more confidence in an outside company that has dedicated itself to backup services (unlike Microsoft).

Having said all that, I do have one (stupid) question. After installing Macrium Reflect, I was prompted to create bootable media. So I inserted a blank CD. But then I got prompted to do it a second time. Once again, I inserted a blank CD. Now I've got two CDs, one CD in which it appears Macrium was referring to as Rescue Media (which will not boot during my quick test). Then I've got a second CD called Start-Up Media that 'does' boot during my test.

Anyone have an idea why the Macrium software prompted me to insert a CD twice and why this scenario occurred that I have described? I guess it doesn't really matter since I've established one of them does work. But I was curious about this and whether or not I am/was missing something? Thanks.

BTW-looking at the Start-up media on my CD, it does appear very intuitive/easy to use. Tomorrow night I am going to create a new system image of my WIn10 configuration.

 

Don't know about it asking for 2 CDs. I've done a DVD and it only asks for 1 DVD once.

 

Yes, you can. Using backup from Windows built in, you just search for .vhdx file in the backup folder, open disk management and mount it then you can selectively restore file(s). However, I would strongly recommend to use either Macrium Reflect Free or AOMEI Backupper